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( Chapter Twelve: ❛ HELL IS ONLY AN OCEAN AWAY ❜ )
DECEMBER, 1943
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THE SILVER MOONLIGHT OF MIDNIGHT SLIPPED SILKILY THROUGH HER BEDROOM, pooling on the floor at Bill's feet as he picked up his shirt which had been tossed over her tea dress, turned inside out on the floor. She watched his figure in her sleep-induced haze, propping herself up against the headboard with a pillow to buffer her spine against the cool wood.
With her platinum hair beautifully unruly and just as pale as the moonglow that reflected in the whites of her eyes, Ginny tugged the duvet up to her collarbone to preserve her modesty. A room that was once saccharine and orange with passion and warmth was now bone white with chill. The mood had depressed down from spontaneity to a mutual knowledge of the inevitable. Bill was to return to his billet. He was probably already late. It was so easy to lose track of time in Ginny's company. He chose not to check the clock; thinking too much about time left him watching as every tick marked a second closer to the end of their entanglement.
They looked so good when they were together, two attractive blondes that may as well have come in a paper-doll sprawl as a matching set. Ginny wanted to believe that they belonged together, like peaches and cream in a tin. A tram on its line screeched outside. For some, the night was just beginning. A colourful carnival of swing skirts and hair-bows oozed out of one bar to another, Aussie men keen to win their girls back with a night on the town. Tomorrow, things would be back to normal. Normal.
Their hometown would be Yank-free once again, and perhaps even all the better for it. Perhaps the girls would quell their hysteria and go back to being married to an kitchen apron and not a foreigner. Ginny could apologise to her parents for bringing a stranger into the intimacy of their home.
Merely asking for forgiveness, though, didn't mean that those things had never happened. Just because the Americans would be gone didn't mean the memories of them would be. There would still be knocked-up Aussie girls disowned by their parents and war-wives weeping into handkerchiefs over their husbands shipping back out to the Solomon Islands.
Bill leaving didn't mean she got her virginity back. She was still lying debauched and undressed in a bed with a strange satisfaction mewling in her stomach, the attractive bend of her leg milky pale and exposed above the sheets. She was still the epitome of a respectable young Melbourne good-girl gone bad, made a fallen woman by the Americans.
She watched him as he combed his tow blonde hair back with his fingers as he peered into the small glass she had above her dresser. He could see her over his shoulder, glowing in the light from the window, like his very own pin-up that he'd memorised. He considered what he'd tell his friends when they asked where he'd been all evening, whether he'd admit he'd actually slept with a woman. Maybe they'd think it was uncharacteristic of him; he'd never shown too much interest in girls on other occasions, and had spent most of his time sleeping and drinking himself into an early grave.
He wasn't a stranger to the whole game, though. There had been girls back in America. Nothing long-term, just girls who'd asked him out and he'd happened to be free the same weekend, and one thing had led to another and then he was being chased shirtless off their land by an angry father with a shotgun. He wasn't a chaser, typically. It wasn't like him to aspire for something and to go and get it.
Ginny was the impossible objective. She didn't look like any of the other girls who'd drape themselves off his arm and ask for him to buy them a drink. Perhaps it was the way that she'd shown no interest in him at all that had been so magnetic. That she tried to reject him at every advance. It humoured him. At first, it was a naked attraction to her that made him flustered to a point that he want to act like he couldn't have cared less about her existence, but a month or so later he was waiting outside her front door just to see her.
Whether he'd want to believe it himself or not, Bill desperately wanted to stay with Ginny. He never wanted to go back to that sweaty, dingy jungle where he went deaf from mortars and was chewed alive by mosquitos. He wanted to stay with the clean, porcelain girl from Melbourne who'd made him coffee and washed his shirt for him when beer had been spilt on it. That's what all men wanted though, wasn't it? A younger, sexier version of their mother that lacked enough resemblance to their actual mother that meant they were able to have sex with them without feeling weird about it.
Ginny was part of the WAAS, though, wasn't she? Her own life had been up for the taking and she'd seized it with both hands. Perhaps she'd be better off without him to weigh her down. Yes, that was it. Bill sighed. He was ready to leave. He'd buckled his slacks back up and buttoned his shirt, tied the cream-coloured tie that had been removed with so much haste a couple of hours before.
Given a little more time, they could have been sweethearts. He could have been her intended. Could have. Would have. Should have. Ginny felt a terrible pang in her chest. "Let me come with you," she demanded pathetically, her eyes watery and blue and deep enough to drown in. If she hadn't been confined to her bed on account of nudity, she'd have marched right up towards him and forced him to let her go too. "I can walk, I don't mind."
"No, you stay here," he told her stubbornly, his accent tugging the end of his words into an upwards inflection. "I ain't gonna let you walk back home in the dark alone."
"Bill, wait . . ." her voice was soft but pained, "I'm never gonna see you again, am I?"
There was something in the shallows of his eyes: remorse. She could see it from where she sat. He painfully bid, "Goodnight," and then he was gone without another word. He told himself if he'd stayed a moment longer he probably would have cracked.
She slept very little that night, and was out of the door like a rocket by daybreak, passing her mother in the kitchen without a word. She'd plonked her mother's crimson-red cloche hat on her head after forgetting to put her hair up in pillow rollers the night before, too preoccupied with a man's hand knotting the back of her hair to even consider what she was going to do with it afterwards other than allow it to swoop into a birds-nest spun from silk. In her powder-blue dress that reminded her of him, the redness of the hat and the whiteness of her hair made her look like a walking flag; be that Australian or American, she wasn't sure.
The lack of nylon covering her legs allowed the morning breeze to swirl past her ankles and against her thighs where the hairs were blonde and feather-soft. She walked so quickly towards the dock that her skirts and hair flowed behind her like the flags they resembled.
She hadn't been to the dock since Jackie had dragged her there last January on the day the men had arrived. I'd never seen men who looked so sad. She wondered if they'd look the same today, with glum, worn eyes and frowns.
But what she was met with was the total opposite; men were cheering and waving, and blown-up condoms filled with air bounced around from the ship to the pier. Everyone seemed over the moon except her and one other person. She had to scan the men leaning over the edge of the boat for a moment, all in one massive row as they peered down at the Australian girls with their American faces.
There: she honed in on him like a submarine scope, her eyes narrowed in the sun and her hand up to shield her eyes from the sun like she was saluting someone. People jostled, and he left them bump against her, swaying, unmoving in the middle of the crowd as her hand fell back down to her side again. She stared up at Bill from the crowds of people, he somehow caught sight of her from his space on the boat's deck, a cigarette hanging from his lower lip, and in his eyes, blue flares. He looked sterner than she'd ever seen him in his steel pot helmet, with bags beneath his eyes.
She ought to have been in some classy mink coat, or a pair of those round sunglasses the bobby soxers wore. Maybe she should have even had one of those sweetheart pins the US NAVY soldiers gave their sweethearts. She would have looked more formidable than she actually did that day, a plain, shapeless girl in a blue cotton dress. She should have been proud of her serving soldier, and glad to see him go. After all, he was fighting for the sake of her Australian freedom. She should have been without regret, but she wasn't — she should have said so many things that had never quite vocalised in her throat. But you can't just control everything, he'd told her once. And now, her lip was buttoned shut. She hadn't felt so vulnerable since the failure of the Greek campaign.
So in December 1943 he took her virginity away with him on some rustbucket boat to an island she'd never be able to pronounce the name of. Hell was only an ocean away, and now her Heaven was too.